Leibniz, by Anthony Kenny, in his Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
LEIBNIZ
Both Malebranche and Spinoza were important influences on the thinking of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz was born in 1646, the son of a professor of philosophy at Leipzig University. He started to read metaphysics in early youth, and by the age of thirteen became familiar with the writings of the scholastics, to which he remained much more sympathetic than most of his contemporaries. He studied mathematics at Jena and law at Altdorf, where he was offered, and refused, a professorship at the age of twenty-one. He entered the service of the Archbishop of Mainz, and on a diplomatic mission to Paris met many of the leading thinkers of the day, and came under the influence of Descartes’ successors. There, in 1676, he invented the infinitesimal calculus, unaware of Newton’s earlier but as yet unpublished discoveries. On his way back to Germany he visited Spinoza, and studied the Ethics in manuscript.
From 1676 until the end of his life Leibniz was a courtier to successive Dukes of Brunswick. He was the librarian of the court library at Wolfenbüttel, and spent many years compiling the history of the House of Brunswick. He founded learned societies and became the first president of the Prussian Academy. …
… When in 1714 the elector George of Hanover became King George I of the United Kingdom, Leibniz was left behind. No doubt he would have been unwelcome in England because he had quarrelled with Newton over the ownership of the infinitesimal calculus. …
Throughout his life Leibniz wrote highly original work on many branches of philosophy, but he published only a few comparatively short treatises. His earliest treatise was the brief Discourse on Metaphysics which he sent in 1686 to Antoine Arnauld, the Jansenist author of the Port Royal Logic. This was followed in 1695 by the New System of Nature. The longest work published in his lifetime was Essays in Theodicy, a vindication of divine justice in the face of the evils of the world, dedicated to Queen Charlotte of Prussia. Two of Leibniz’s most important short treatises appeared in 1714: the Monadology and The Principles of Nature and of Grace. A substantial criticism of Locke’s empiricism, New Essays on Human Understanding, did not appear until nearly fifty years after his death.
Much of his most interesting work was not published until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Since Leibniz kept many of his most powerful ideas out of his published work, the correct interpretation of his philosophy continues to be a matter of controversy. He wrote much on logic, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophical theology; his knowledge of all these subjects was encyclopedic, and indeed he projected a comprehensive encyclopedia of human knowledge …
… It remains unclear how far Leibniz’s significant contributions to these different disciplines are consistent with each other, and which parts of his system are foundation and which are superstructure.
But there are close links between parts of his output which seem at first sight poles apart. In his De Arte Combinatoria he put forward the idea of an alphabet of human thought into which all truths could be analysed, and he wanted to develop a single, universal, language which would mirror the structure of the world. … Such a language would also promote international co-operation between scientists of different nations. …
… In logic he distinguishes between truths of reason and truths of fact. Truths of reason are necessary, and their opposite is impossible; truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. Truths of fact, unlike truths of reason, are based not on the principle of contradiction, but on a different principle: the principle that nothing happens without a sufficient reason why it should be thus rather than otherwise. This principle of sufficient reason was an innovation of Leibniz, and as we shall see, it was to lead to some astonishing conclusions.
All necessary truths are analytic: ‘when a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached’.
[MGH: Kenny has left out the important bit — with the ‘resolving’ it becomes synthesis (primary/primitive ideas/truth), which Leibniz set apart from analysis. The two are distinct.]
Contingent propositions, or truths of fact, are not in any obvious sense analytic, and men can discover them only by empirical investigation. …
… Leibniz told Arnauld that the theory that every true predicate is contained in the notion of the subject entailed that every soul was a world apart, independent of everything else except God. A ‘world apart’ of this kind was what Leibniz later called a ‘monad’, and in his Monadology Leibniz presented a system which resembles that of Malebranche. But he reached this position by a novel route.
Whatever is complex, Leibniz argued, is made up of what is simple, and whatever is simple is unextended, for if it were extended it could be further divided. But whatever is material is extended, hence there must be simple immaterial, soul-like entities. These are the monads.
Whereas for Spinoza there is only one substance, with the attributes of both thought and extension, and whereas for Malebranche there are independent substances, some with the properties of matter, and some with the properties of mind, for Leibniz there are infinitely many substances, with the properties only of mind.
Like Malebranche’s substances, Leibniz’s monads cannot be causally affected by any other creatures. ‘Monads have no windows, by which anything could come in or go out.’ Because they have no parts, they cannot grow or decay: they can begin only by creation, and end only by annihilation. They can, however, change; indeed they change constantly; but they change from within. Since they have no physical properties to alter, their changes must be changes of mental states: the life of a monad, Leibniz says, is a series of perceptions. …
… A monad mirrors the world, not because it is affected by the world, but because [it is] programmed … to change in synchrony with the world. A good clockmaker can construct two clocks which will keep such perfect time that they forever strike the hours at the same moment. …
All monads have perception, that is to say, they have an internal state which is a representation of all the other items in the universe. This inner state will change as the environment changes, not because of the environmental change, but because of the internal drive or ‘appetition’ which has been programmed into them … Monads are incorporeal automata: when Leibniz wishes to stress this aspect of them he calls them ‘entelechies’.
There is a world of created beings – living things, animals, entelechies and souls – in the least part of matter. Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of each plant, every member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is itself likewise a similar garden or pond.
We are nowadays familiar with the idea of the human body as an assemblage of cells, each living an individual life. The monads which, in Leibniz’s system, corresponded to a human body were like cells in having an individual life-history, but unlike cells in being immaterial and immortal. Each animal has an entelechy which is its soul; but the members of its body are full of other living things which have their own souls.
Within the human being the dominant monad is the rational soul. This dominant monad, in comparison with other monads, has a more vivid mental life and a more imperious appetition. It has not just perception but ‘apperception’, that is to say consciousness or reflective knowledge of the inner state, which is perception. Its own good is the goal, or final cause, not just of its own activity but also of all the other monads which it dominates. This is all that is left, in Leibniz’s system, of Descartes’ notion that the soul acts upon the body.
In all this, is any room left for free-will? Human beings, like all agents, finite or infinite, need a reason for acting: that follows from Leibniz’s ‘principle of sufficient reason’. But in the case of free agents, he maintains, the motives which provide the sufficient reason ‘incline without necessitating’.
But it is hard to see how he can make room for a special kind of freedom for human beings. True, in his system no agent of any kind is acted on from outside; all are completely self-determining. But no agent, whether rational or not, can step outside the life-history laid out for it in the pre-established harmony. Hence it seems that Leibniz’s ‘freedom of spontaneity’ – the freedom to act upon one’s motives – is an illusory liberty. …
… Not all things which are possible in advance can be made actual together: in Leibniz’s terms, A and B may each be possible, but A and B may not be compossible. Any created world is therefore a system of compossibles, and the best possible world is the system which has the greatest surplus of good over evil. A world in which there is free-will which is sometimes … misused is better than a world in which there is neither freedom nor sin. …
… It is interesting to compare Leibniz’s position here with that of Descartes and Aquinas. Descartes’ God was totally free: even the laws of logic were the result of his arbitrary fiat. Leibniz, like Aquinas before him, maintained that the eternal truths depended not on God’s will but on his understanding; where logic was concerned God had no choice. Aquinas’ God, though not as free as Descartes’, is less constrained than Leibniz’s. For, according to Aquinas, though whatever God does is good, he is never obliged to do what is best. Indeed, for Aquinas, given God’s omnipotence, the notion of ‘the best of all possible worlds’ is every bit as nonsensical as that of ‘the greatest of all possible numbers’.
Leibniz’s optimistic theory was memorably mocked by Voltaire in his novel Candide, in which the Leibnizian Dr Pangloss responds to a series of miseries and catastrophes with the incantation ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.
The Leibnizian monadology is a baroque efflorescence of Cartesian metaphysics. His work marks the high point of continental rationalism; his successors in Germany, especially Wolff, developed a dogmatic scholasticism which was the system in which Immanuel Kant was brought up, and which was to be the target, in his maturity, of his devastating criticism.
Leibniz’s claim to greatness lies not in his systematic creations, but in the conceptions and distinctions which he contributed to many different branches of philosophy, and which became standard coin among succeed ing philosophers.
Several of these – the distinction between different kinds of truths, the notions of analyticity and compossibility – we have already met. We may add, finally, Leibniz’s treatment of identity. From the principle of sufficient reason Leibniz concluded that there were not in nature two beings indiscernible from each other; for if there were, God would act without reason in treating one differently from the other. From this principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, he derives a definition of the identity of terms.
‘Terms are identical which can be substituted one for another wherever we please without altering the truth of any statement.’ If whatever is true of A is true of B, and vice versa, then A = B. This account of identity, known as Leibniz’s law … has been taken by most subsequent philosophers as the basis of their discussions of identity.
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The Source of today’s exhibit has been:
Anthony Kenny, An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, 20th anniversary edition, Wiley, John Wiley & Sons 2019
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